Top 6 Reasons to Use Mobile Phone Verification for Your Business

Companies are seeing an increase in security breaches due to spammers and scammers. These breaches can result in a poor customer experience and may lead to a decrease in customer retention, or worse, they could negatively affect your brand and result in legal and financial repercussions. To decrease the potential for compromised security, a great solution is consistently using phone verification for verifying phone numbers at every stage of the customer lifecycle, including account creation, transaction authentication, and ongoing customer engagement activities. With more than six billion mobile phone numbers registered worldwide, the mobile phone number is the ultimate way to verify user identity.

Here are six user management best practices where mobile phone verification can increase security and boost customer acquisition and retention:

Authenticate registration: When a new user registers for your application, phone verification can help authenticate identity, ensuring your new user is who they claim to be. For example, a new user who downloads an app and registers a new account will receive an SMS with a PIN code to be entered in the app on their device to complete the user registration process. This step links a user and their device.

Authorize upgrades: Many applications employ a freemium model, meaning the basic app is free to use but a premium version can be accessed via a paid upgrade. Providing an SMS code with a PIN to verify mobile users and their intent to upgrade can help reduce mistaken downloads and curb fraudulent downloads.

Reset passwords: When a user logs in to an app from an unknown or alternative device (i.e. with a different IP address from the one registered in their profile) and requests a password reset, sending a code via SMS to verify the user’s identity can help reduce fraud and identity theft. For example, Gmail uses this process to verify your identity via your mobile phone number whenever a login attempt originates from an unknown device.

Reactivate users: When a user of an application or website attempts to sign in after a long period of inactivity, a mobile phone verification process can help ensure once again that your user is genuine and not a hacker or spammer.

Refresh user details: Changes in user profile information should always be confirmed with a simple SMS message to the mobile number linked to an account. This step will verify the change. Ensuring that changes have been initiated by the account owner is not only essential for security but also for accurate information delivery to users. For instance, an airline can share important flight updates with customers only if they have current contact information.

Authenticate transaction: Confirming transactions with real time communications significantly reduces costly fraud resolution. Requiring authentication of users at this critical moment via mobile phone verification is so effective at reducing suspicious activity that many payment and e-commerce applications and websites now require authentication of transactions with a one-time password (OTP) sent via SMS.

Want to learn more about how to increase security and mitigate the risk of fraud and spam for your application or website? Read how Dates of Asia managed to boost their conversion rate up to 94 percent using Nexmo Verify.

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